euthanasia

One of my greatest frustrations has been the general silence of suicide prevention organizations in the face of the legalization of assisted suicide in various jurisdictions. To me, this failure has been an abdication of such groups’ core responsibility because it ignores some suicides, does not oppose facilitation of the suicides of the ill and disabled, and does not grapple with the adverse impact that assisted suicide advocacy can have on suicidal people generally.

That silence has now ended. The International Association for Suicide Prevention just issued a (not quite strong enough) position paper that (equivocally) opposes legalization. From, the “IASP Position Statement on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (2025)” (my emphasis):

At the present time, countries and jurisdictions are increasingly legalising and regulating assisted suicide, euthanasia, or both practices (sometimes called “Medically Assisted Death,” “Physician Assisted Death,” “Medical Aid in Dying” or similar terms). Assisted suicide is when a medical practitioner provides a patient who has asked to die with the means, usually prescription drugs, for the patient to self-administer to end their own life. Euthanasia is when the medical practitioner directly administers the lethal substance.

There is a strong potential for overlap or equivalence between what we consider to be suicide and euthanasia and assisted suicide (EaAS), particularly when EaAS is provided not at the end of life and instead to those with chronic conditions for whom death is not imminent.…

Read More ›

The future that some of us predicted about assisted suicide deployed as a resource saver has come to the U.K. Even as the House of Commons has passed a legalization bill — currently being debated in the House of Lords — the country’s hospice system is collapsing. From the BBC story:

Some 380 hospice beds out of around 2,000 lie empty in England because of financial pressures, say bosses.

Hospice UK has told BBC News this is up from 300 a year ago and illustrates the severe challenges facing the sector.

Beds are left empty to save money — since staffing and caring is costly — and so are unavailable to patients.

Do you know what isn’t costly? Assisted suicide. Poison is cheap.

The Illinois Legislature has just passed an assisted suicide legalization bill, tying a black bow along with New York’s legalization bill passed a few months ago. Both measures still await signing by the states’ respective governors, which I fear is quite likely as the death agenda is firmly ensconced in blue state liberal/progressive policy on assisted suicide.

Should the bills get signed into law, more people will live in jurisdictions (including three of our most populous: California, New York, and Illinois) that validate some suicides and allow doctors to facilitate such deaths than live in states where assisted suicide remains illegal.

The states are nationalizing assisted suicide as well. New York’s bill has no residency requirement. Vermont and Oregon did away with theirs. And the Illinois bill’s residency requirement is so weak that one could become a resident in a day by, say, renting an apartment and registering to vote.

When assisted suicide is first proposed for legalization, we are assured by death activists that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. But they don’t mean it. Once the laws pass, the supposed protections — which are always flaccid to begin with — are soon redefined by activists and the media as “barriers,” et voila, the laws are soon loosened. It’s all a con, but people seem to fall for it every time.

This pattern can be seen vividly playing out in Victoria, Australia. The state was the first in that country to legalize assisted suicide, and now the government is making more people eligible for legally hastened death. From the premier’s announcement:

The new legislation will remove unnecessary barriers to accessing VAD, improve clarity for practitioners, strengthen safety measurements and make the system fairer and more compassionate.

See what I mean? “Strengthen safety,” (!!!) and “fairer and more compassionate,” really just means more people can become dead much sooner.

Public-advocacy-focused secular bioethics is largely progressive politics covered with a veneer of expertise. While there are certainly university courses and degrees in the field, no bioethicist is licensed as such. Indeed, the entire discourse is purely subjective. It is driven mostly by philosophers, professors, doctors, and lawyers who opine about a particular set of issues, your faithful correspondent included.

But now, members of the tribe apparently want to pretend that secular bioethics has become such a deeply ingrained part of our societal bedrock that it qualifies as a moral tradition. From, “Bioethics as an Emerging Moral Tradition and Some Implications for Adversarial Cooperation,” published in the influential Journal of Medical Ethics (citations omitted):

In a forthcoming book titled The Emerging Tradition of Secular Bioethics,…we focus on whether the field of bioethics in the pluralistic and increasingly polarised American context can give justified moral guidance in foundational, clinical, research and public health domains. We argue against a proceduralistic account of bioethics that limits the field to analysing moral problems and clarifying key concepts but never offering substantive moral guidance. We also reject an Enlightenment account of bioethics based on universal, neutral and abstract rational standards and moral first principles that are undeniable by any reasonable person and that can (in theory) eliminate all fundamental moral disagreements. Rather, we argue that while once naming a discourse through which various historically embedded moral traditions could discuss ethical challenges, bioethics is now an emerging content-full moral tradition in its own right.

Notice that the entire premise excludes the moral influence of religion — which is a much deeper tradition with a far longer history — even though one of the founding fathers of bioethics was the great Christian theologian Paul Ramsey. Moreover, some of the most vibrant minds arguing against contemporary mainstream views — such as the astute Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy (among many others) — would seem, by definition, to be excluded from the supposed “moral tradition” because their principles are profoundly influenced by faith. (For those who would applaud, please recall that eugenics was a progressive secular policy resisted most vociferously by the Catholic Church.)

Once we decided that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, the kind of suffering that qualifies us to be made dead continually expands. Now, an elderly British couple have committed joint assisted suicide at a Swiss termination clinic to avoid future widowhood and increasing fragility — in other words, to eliminate future suffering. From the Daily Record story: A devoted couple who “couldn’t bear to be apart” have died together at a Swiss assisted dying clinic after sending emails to their relatives to let them know. Neither Michael Posner, 97, nor his wife Ruth, 96, had a terminal illness, but had made the decision to die together because they were desperate not to be apart after 75 years of Read More ›

I have always believed that liberals should be leading opponents of assisted suicide. After all, two of the core tenets of liberalism are (supposed to be) protecting vulnerable people from exploitation and promoting equality among all people. But other than disability-rights activists, most liberals tend to support legalization based on “choice.” Mega author J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, is definitely a political liberal. Indeed, her activism pushing against gender ideology is founded in protecting children and securing women’s private spaces. Now, with legalization having passed the U.K. House of Commons and the bill now being debated in the House of Lords, she has come out in opposition to state-sanctioned assisted suicide. From The Lion story: Author J.K. Rowling has Read More ›

I understand that people are terrified of dementia. Believe me, I get it. My mother died of Alzheimer’s. But I can’t wrap my head around the fact that advocacy for killing/suicide as the answer to the difficulties caused by the condition is becoming ubiquitous. Noted bioethicist and lawyer Thaddeus Mason Pope has written an essay, to be published in an edited volume, on this very issue. It lists eleven ways people can “avoid late-stage dementia,” and almost all involve intentionally ending life. Remember when we were told that advance medical directives are the key to not receiving life-extending treatment one does not want? They are, but that’s not good enough for Pope, because it doesn’t guarantee death: This strategy is Read More ›

ALS is a catastrophic terminal disease that, within a few years of diagnosis (the physicist Stephen Hawking was an exception), eventually causes total paralysis. It is also a tragic condition that euthanasia/assisted suicide activists zealously wield to justify killing as an acceptable answer to suffering.

Now, the understandable fear of ALS is being deployed by academic advocates as a means of breaking the (U.S.) requirement for a six-month terminal diagnosis and self-administration in assisted suicide.

In jurisdictions where MAiD [the euphemism for assisted suicide that seeks to turn life-ending it into a medical “treatment”]is legally available, such laws are intended to support patient autonomy and alleviate suffering. However, for patients with ALS, the clinical reality of progressive paralysis combined with legal requirements for self-administration of lethal medication creates a cruel dilemma. Approximately one-third of affected individuals express interest in MAiD if their suffering becomes intolerable [12], yet current laws require that it be initiated while patients retain the physical ability to self-administer the prescribed medication.

However, patients are not legally eligible to access MAiD until it is determined they have a life expectancy of six months or less. This creates a narrow and clinically unrealistic window where waiting until they meet legal eligibility may mean they are no longer physically capable of completing the required act, regardless of prognosis, suffering, or intent.

People sometimes tell me that nothing can be more extreme than the transgender craze. I disagree. The next step is already in sight, what is sometimes called “transableism.” Transableism is an advocacy term for a mental illness known as Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). People with the condition anguish that they were born with body parts or capacities that they should not have. This may express as an obsession to become an amputee or paraplegic, as just two examples. Here is an extreme case from the U.K. as reported by the Daily Mail: A surgeon with a “sexual obsession” for cutting off parts of his body had his own legs amputated as part of an insurance scam, officials in the UK said Read More ›